Obituary for Robert Paine

Jane Lubchenco authored a beautiful obituary for the incredibly influential ecologist, Robert T. Paine, who passed away on June 13, 2016. He developed the concept of keystone species, top predators that strongly influence the abundance of other organisms within their communities.

While Bob Paine demonstrated this with ochre sea stars and mussels on the Washington coast, keystone species exist across multiple terrestrial and aquatic environments.